Posted on 10/08/2019 9:27:05 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Everyone’s on drugs here . . . and stealing,” an ex-felon named Shaku explains as he rips open a blue Popsicle wrapper with his teeth. Shaku is standing in an encampment of tents, trash, and bicycles, across from San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Church. Another encampment-dweller lights a green crack pipe and passes it around. A few paces down the street, a gaunt man swipes a credit card through a series of parking meters to see if it has been reported stolen yet.
For the last three decades, San Francisco has conducted a real-life experiment in what happens when a society stops enforcing bourgeois norms of behavior. The city has done so in the name of compassion toward the homeless. The results have been the opposite: street squalor and misery have increased, even as government expenditures have ballooned. Yet the principles that have guided the city’s homelessness policy remain inviolate: homelessness is a housing problem; it is involuntary; and its persistence is the result of inadequate public spending. These propositions are readily disproved by talking to people living on the streets.
Shaku’s assessment of drug use among the homeless is widely shared. Asked if she does drugs, a formerly homeless woman, just placed in a city-subsidized single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotel, responds incredulously: “Is that a trick question?” A 33-year-old woman from Alabama, who now lives in a tent in an industrial area outside downtown, says: “Everyone out here has done something—drugs, you name it.” On Sutter Avenue, a wizened 50-year-old named Jeff slumps over his coffee cup at 7:30 AM, one hand holding a sweet roll, the other playing with his beard.
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
MORE OBSERVATIONS ON THE STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO:
Forty-two percent of respondents in the city’s 2019 street poll of the homeless reported chronic drug or alcohol use; the actual percentage is likely higher.
The city relentlessly sends the message that drug use is not only acceptable but fully expected.
Users dig for veins in plain view on the sidewalk; health authorities distribute more than 4.5 million syringes a year, along with Vitamin C to dissolve heroin and crack, alcohol swabs, and instructions on how to best tie one’s arm for a “hit.”
Needle disposal boxes have been erected outside the city’s public toilets, signaling to children that drug use is a normal part of adult life.
Only 60 percent of the city’s free needles get returned; many of the rest litter the sidewalks and streets or are flushed down toilets.
Hondurans have dominated the drug trade in the Tenderloin and around Civic Center Plaza and Union Square since the 1990s.
Most of the dealers are illegal aliens. They congregate up to a dozen a corner, openly counting and recounting large wads of cash, completing transactions with no attempt at concealment.
MORE OBSERVATIONS:
Mental illness is the other obvious condition afflicting the homeless that makes the question of affordable housing secondary.
Thirty-nine percent of the homeless polled in the 2019 street survey said that they suffered from psychiatric conditions; the actual percentage is probably higher.
When you let the inmates run things, chaos ensues. Enjoy your continued decline S.F.
It must be a liberal thing, to confuse compassion with tolerating harmful behavior and letting people do whatever they please. If the city was truly compassionate it would not allow any of this.
This is a problem that can’t be fixed. Not because it’s too difficult to find a solution, but because the people voting, and the people in charge can’t even conceive a different course of action.
Leftists are unable to acknowledge any flaws in their policies. And liberal voters are unable to vote for anything but more leftist policies.
The city will literally burn and become a rotting shell before people capable of fixing things are put in charge.
DEFUND uncivilized crap-holes, foreign and domestic.
And at the same time they’re touting the wonderful world they’re planning where nearly everyone lives in mega cities using mass transit because urban centers are wonderful centers of culture and a green, comfortable, life.
The GOP-e should hold up Nan’s San Francisco as a model of what the country would look like IF dims got their way.
just another predictable case of ‘Allowing the inmates to run the asylum”
...homelessness is a housing problem; it is involuntary; and its persistence is the result of inadequate public spending...
Actually, the solution to homelessness is, MORE HOMELESS! Let's all send 'em all the homeless we can find.
San Fran Nan’s example of Democrat policies in action. The whole USA could easily become this if the Dem party succeeds.
In other words, liberals continue to deny the existence of reality.
If that's based on self-reporting by alcoholics and drug addicts … well, it's an old saying about alcohol that drinkers on the downward progression can move from light casual drinking to constant drinking, a fifth or more a day, drinking to passing out on a daily basis, and be surrounded every step of the way by people who drink exactly the same way, with all of them thinking they are normal.
The DNC has “Hiroshimaed” every American city. That’s a feat no enemy has ever done and always wanted to. As a side benefit to the left,the populations/demographics are totally socially re-engineered to base line retarded and dependent.
The combination of maximal tolerance for antisocial behavior, on the one hand, and free services and food, on the other, acts as a magnet.
One might note that "Free-attle" now has the problem as well for exactly the same reason. It's combination of enabling a profoundly destructive lifestyle under the excuse of "compassion" and a perverse version of class warfare that is one of the Left's fundamental tactics:
The advocates’ insistence on larding homeless housing through every part of a city, no matter the real-estate costs, is their revenge on the bourgeois values that they despise.
The problem, in their view, isn't really a problem at all, it's a punishment on the competent members of society for "inequality", as if equal squalor is preferable. The very few honest among them will admit it. Legalizing behavior for some that is and should be clearly illegal is one tactic in this forced societal leveling:
Such enforcement, according to court personnel, criminalizes poverty. But the rule of law does not have an income threshold; its application should be universal.
Critical Law states otherwise, and has captured the legal activists. Under this doctrine equal enforcement of the law is merely a means for the oppressor to keep the oppressed in their place, and unequal application of the law is a legitimate means of addressing this. That it sets up the courts as demigods dispensing favors arbitrarily is just fine for those doing the dispensing. They are, in their own minds, dispensing "justice" by doing so.
So yes, it's a profoundly political problem with no end in sight due to a determined refusal to recognize that fact. Twisting civil rights to mean that a person has the right to live on the streets, defecate where he or she wants, use whatever drugs he or she wants, disobey whatever laws he or she wants, in short, to live like an animal, and using the auspices of the state to keep that individual from the consequences, is an insult to "rights" and uncivil by definition.
They are breeding human pets. Pets are beloved while free Americans are hated around the world.
I left my sh$t in SF.
That is a fact. I recall when I was moving out of San Francisco and had a lot of items that I had to remove myself (if you catch my drift). I pulled up on Mission Street across from the MacDonalds near 16th. Hopped out of my car and ran across Mission Street to grab a bite to eat. This SF cop calls me over and starts giving me a lecture on Jay-walking. Right behind the cop, about half a block away, I could see all the wide open drug dealing going on at the 16th & Mission BART station. It was absolutely surreal. I was tempted to say something but kept my lips zipped except for "yes sir" and "no sir," keenly aware that if he looked in the trunk of my car I 'd probably spend the night in jail at a minimum.
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